It’s a scenario that plays out every week across radio stations all around the country. Your promotions team comes to you and says they have tickets to a concert to giveaway and you need a new, exciting, fun, ground breaking idea that works for both the station and the promoter. Oh, and they need the idea 30 minutes ago.
Sound familiar?
I’m pretty sure this scenario played out across many stations last week when AC/DC announced their “Rock or Bust” concert tour for November 2015. AC/DC is one of the highest grossing tour acts in the world, they put on a great show, and of course they’re ours! 10 years ago, Triple M may have had a monopoly on AC/DC ticket giveaways because they were the only ones who played their music. Now, with the aging of their fanbase and their music so widespread (or dare we say mainstream), more and more stations want to join the great AC/DC ticket giveaway.
As a content director you have two choices – you can make it simple, just give them away and be perceived as the station that gives away lots of tickets. Or you can design something that creates great, memorable content. Maybe you can get lucky and have both. When Triple M Sydney gave AC/DC tickets away with Club Veg many years ago, who would have thought a simple tactic of asking people to spell “AC/DC” would have resulted in a memorable piece of content that is still talked about today. Remember Mark from Greenacre?
Listeners love ticket giveaways (especially with ticket prices so high), but do you need to do more than just give them away to make sure you stand out? Stations were keen to get on-air this week with giveaways, and here is a quick list of who is doing what with AC/DC tickets.
AC/DC are known for writing memorable guitar riffs, so it’s not surprising to see a few stations employ this tactic. 2UE Sydney are playing “Pick the Riff” in Breakfast where listeners need to identify the guitar riff. Similar to Mix 94.5 Perth who are inviting listeners to listen out for the AC/DC guitar riff in their breakfast show with Clairsy, Shane and Kymba. Across in East Perth, 96FM are using their breakfast show Blackers, Carmen and Fitzy to create AC/DC songs titles in pictures, with listeners asked to guess and submit their answers.
Over in Melbourne, 3AW have taken a more traditional approach. They are asking their listeners to share their most memorable AC/DC moment (in 25 words or less) on their website to win tickets to the Melbourne concert. WSFM’s Jonesy and Amanda are on a break this week, but they are still helping with the stations AC/DC giveaway. They recorded a series of videos where they act out titles of AC/DC songs, and listeners are invited to watch the video then listen to the station the next day to win tickets.
As for Triple M, it seems they are holding most of their tickets back until closer to the concerts in November.
It would be great if every concert giveaway you did could generate great content, but in reality it’s just not the case. Fun, simple ideas such as Jonesy and Amanda’s charades are a nice idea that plays on the fun element of the show. It won’t necessarily increase your share, but if you’re relying on a few concert tickets to help boost your cume or TSL, then think again. It may sound great to give away a double pass to AC/DC, but it all comes back to the content you generate the other 23 hours and 59 minutes of the day.
Story contributed to Radioinfo by Barry Keohane, Australian Content Director and International Radio Consultant